Ambermac tries out Twylah with her own Twitter feed.
Tweets don't live long. Once you send out your 140 characters or less, if you don't get traction within the first few minutes your message is likely buried among the 230 million Twitter messages sent out on the site every single day. That's unfortunate for companies and individuals who devote so much time to the popular social network, hoping to reel in audiences and increase follower numbers.
There is a new service that is gaining traction in the social media world that aims to give your tweets new life. Twylah, yet another web service with a quirky name, offers up what they call "Twitter brand pages." When you look at the company's homepage, up pops a Whole Foods Twitter feed that has been exported into a meaty content-based website. This meatiness is due to lots of images, videos and text. While it might look like a design and development team spent days building the site, with a writer slaving over individual posts, the reality is much different.
CNN calls it a "better storefront for your Twitter brand." Once you sign up, simply plug in your tweeting credentials and the platform automatically sorts through your messages and puts each of them into different categories for reader consumption. When I created my account my Twylah homepage sorted my tweets into such content boxes as social media, CTV, The Globe and Mail, Twitter and "party." Aside from these "trending" @ambermac tweets, there are other topics including 140 Conference, Toronto, and Power Friending (my book).
Thanks to images and videos that are placed front and centre, my Twylah homepage looks even more dynamic than my actual website. If I don't like the topics that the service is pulling, I easily change them to give more important categories a higher profile and I can hide topics that I don't want showing up at all. Finally, I can also send a "power tweet" to direct users to your page.
To date, Twylah has attracted such news organizations as CBS and NBC, such retailers as Banana Republic and Whole Foods, and such celebrities as Martha Stewart and Britney Spears. These are just a few of the many big brands signing on, not to mention thousands of individuals looking to further optimize their Twitter efforts.
While Twylah may not yet be in a position to replace an individual's website, it certainly does an excellent job of creating a rich Twitter-friendly homepage that gives tweets a longer lifespan and readers a more interesting way to sift through content.